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I wonder if it's because of the quirky Swiss military setup where evertyone is basically enlisted as a reservist. I would imagine that the local village will ha

I wonder if it's because of the quirky Swiss military setup where evertyone is basically enlisted as a reservist. I would imagine that the local village will have monthly drills and that they have to organize them somehow. Using WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal might be useful for them as they might already use them for other purposes and everyone has it installed. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Switzerland

jeffrallen 5y ago
No, it's a real army with normal bureaucracy, not a village militia. You get your orders for your once a year repetition course about 3 months before, then show them to your HR department, who arranges for you to have paid time off, paid by the unemployment insurance or something. Then you go do it and come back to work. Your colleagues pick up your tasks while you are gone because you'll do the same for them later (and good teams value cross training anyway). Source: I was a team lead on a team with active Swiss army soldiers. While you are doing exercises, you have access to all the normal army comms stuff, including presumably encrypted digital HF radio for voice and data, satellite days, VHF radios, etc. This order is saying, "don't use commercial products, use the military comms systems we give you". Kind of too bad they didn't give an exception for Signal though... :)
- acoard 5y ago
  I love Signal and use it as my only messenger, but there's no guarantee the server side code is as secure as they say. For a private citizen like myself it certainly looks secure enough (eg in their warrant responses), but I wouldn't want a state to bet it's security on Signal's honesty.
  - jeffrallen 5y ago
    The promise of end to end encryption is that even if the server side put what it sees of your messages on a billboard in Times Square, nothing bad would happen.
    - gaius_baltar 5y ago
      I suspect their objections come from traffic analysis (adversary sees that phone A sends messages to a lot of others→must be a commander or so; a burst of traffic among phones marked as commanders in an unexpected moment→something is being planned, etc.). Also, availability if Internet of cell coverage is cut by the adversary.
    - mwint 5y ago
      This would be a pretty cool advertisement, streaming server logs from production in Times Square. A foolish risk, perhaps, but imagine the buzz.
      - jeffrallen 5y ago
        I love it! Especially if in response to some claimed attack on the public logs the company would say, "hah, hah, JK, the stream has been xor'd with /dev/random all along anyway".

jeffrallen 5y ago

No, it's a real army with normal bureaucracy, not a village militia. You get your orders for your once a year repetition course about 3 months before, then show them to your HR department, who arranges for you to have paid time off, paid by the unemployment insurance or something. Then you go do it and come back to work. Your colleagues pick up your tasks while you are gone because you'll do the same for them later (and good teams value cross training anyway). Source: I was a team lead on a team with active Swiss army soldiers. While you are doing exercises, you have access to all the normal army comms stuff, including presumably encrypted digital HF radio for voice and data, satellite days, VHF radios, etc. This order is saying, "don't use commercial products, use the military comms systems we give you". Kind of too bad they didn't give an exception for Signal though... :)

acoard 5y ago
I love Signal and use it as my only messenger, but there's no guarantee the server side code is as secure as they say. For a private citizen like myself it certainly looks secure enough (eg in their warrant responses), but I wouldn't want a state to bet it's security on Signal's honesty.
- jeffrallen 5y ago
  The promise of end to end encryption is that even if the server side put what it sees of your messages on a billboard in Times Square, nothing bad would happen.
  - gaius_baltar 5y ago
    I suspect their objections come from traffic analysis (adversary sees that phone A sends messages to a lot of others→must be a commander or so; a burst of traffic among phones marked as commanders in an unexpected moment→something is being planned, etc.). Also, availability if Internet of cell coverage is cut by the adversary.
  - mwint 5y ago
    This would be a pretty cool advertisement, streaming server logs from production in Times Square. A foolish risk, perhaps, but imagine the buzz.
    - jeffrallen 5y ago
      I love it! Especially if in response to some claimed attack on the public logs the company would say, "hah, hah, JK, the stream has been xor'd with /dev/random all along anyway".